Ok, help me. I've tried searching the forums but the word "tags" gives me too much irrelevant stuff and I'm thinking asking will be easiest...

Before the new tag changes, the most common and useful tags were "need description" and "image needed" or something close to those - I remember the description one being used over 1500 times. In my spare time, I'd use those tags and go find the descriptions or images needed. They seem to have disappeared, however.

Now, I'll believe that people went and found A LOT of images and descriptions - but all of them? I have my doubts. :-) So... were they wiped out for a reason? Or were they just disappeared in an accidental sweep? I ask before I start using them frequently again, lol. And because I'm SUPER curious!

Some people were trying to be helpful and were marking all the tags they thought irrelevant as inappropriate. This resulted in a lot of tags getting removed. TPTB were able to get some of the personal tags back, maybe if it hasn't been too long since they were nixed, they could recover these ones too.

Thanks, Melanie. I'd ask for their return, but I can't remember the exact words so it might be difficult. Maybe the frequency of use would be a way for them to be found? I'll give it a shot. :-)

That actually brings up another question - could "reporting" one tag on one book wipe it out across the board? That seems really stupid, and PBS hasn't been particularly stupid, lol, so it seems unlikely but I guess it could have happened.

The rules say it is not supposed to remove it from anything but the one book that is reported on. I think the problem was that "helpful" people were bringing up the whole list of books under a tag and marking every single usage as inappropriate, thus wiping them out completely. I am in no position to know any of this for a fact BTW :) This is just what I have gotten from posts in the forum. People were talking about assisting in the cleanup of inappropriate tags, and then all of a sudden we had personal, and other seemingly-to-them irrelevant tags disappearring in mass.

In the club tag cloud (under "community") the tags used to be listed by how many times a tag had been used. Now they are listed by how many members are using a tag. So my personal tags, even if I have a lot of them, aren't going to show up in the cloud since I'm the only one using them.

The "description needed" and "image needed" tags ended up not being as helpful as they could have been, because someone would add an image or a description, but the person who had tagged the book would not remove the tag. So pretty soon, a lot of the "image need" books actually had images. And same with the descriptions.

There's a blue link at the bottom of every page here called "upload book covers." If you want to find books that need images, click on that link, and then near the top on the right, click on "List books without cover images."

Patty - See, now, I clean up my tags as often as possible, but even for those who don't, I'd think THAT's when people would Report the tag. Of course, I think one Report shouldn't be enough to get rid of a tag completely, all it would take is one disgruntled dope and *poof*... Anyway, is it possible that you see that link ("List books without cover images.")because you're part of the book cover team? It's not on the page when I look at it.

Patty mentioned above "n the club tag cloud (under "community") the tags used to be listed by how many times a tag had been used. Now they are listed by how many members are using a tag. So my personal tags, even if I have a lot of them, aren't going to show up in the cloud since I'm the only one using them."

Clear at the bottom of the tag cloud is a link clearly set aside from all the others that says "Go To My Tags."

We were asked by the Image Collectors to remove this tag since it was not effective

Well, don't do it again, lol. Pleeeeeease. :-) I'm using it - properly! I promise I check often, to remove it when a full-sized image appears. I'm using several like it, and cleaning up after myself as I go; they help a lot and since PBS is the beneficiary of my boredom.... pleeeeease let me use it!

If you want to use the tags effectively to tag the books you personally come across and want to later come back to fix descriptions or add images to, add your initials to the tag, and this allows you to pull up only your images or your edits to be done.

Some tags you could include (and these are similar my personal ones, each of us use our own initials):

RC-sln (Reviewed & Complete-my initials)(means to others & myself, that I've worked on it, and done the best I can without the book in my hand)

RI-sln (Reviewed & Incomplete-my initials) (something is missing, and if you have a copy of this book, could you pull it from your shelf and finish it?)

The "something missing" could be the cover image, or data such as the publication date, publisher, # of pages, dimensions, or whatever.

As you work on the ones that you have tagged, you try to delete the tag immediately, but if you do a bunch at once, and forget to remove the tags, it's now only your own tags that come up when you pull the EC books instead of that of a whole bunch of people doing the same thing only slightly different. Hope this helps those of you that would like to help with the images and data.